An explanation of the Voynich Manuscript text

[nickpelling]

Hi Donald, and welcome to the forum!

What about the state transition probabilities? Do you have any idea on how they are pre-determined by the person who generates the text?

No, that's a historical question.   I arrived at them through reverse engineering.   The only clue I have is that they vary from one part of the manuscript to another, so after generating the first table (possibly by trial and error?), subsequent tables could be generated by modifying the transition probabilities in the previous table.   The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows a distribution from herbal through astronomical and text to biological, so I presume the text was generated in that order (or possibly reverse order).

One of the main criticisms I had of Gordon Rugg's table-and-grille explanation was that it presupposed that a very CompSci mindset was behind it all, which always made what he put forward seem like a modern back projection, i.e. that's he would have done it had it been him but 500+ years earlier.

Which is, of course, nonsensical.

More recently, we've had Don collecting the stats for Voynichese into a relatively fat dictionary and saying that this alone is sufficient to explain Voynichese.

Which, of course, it isn't.

Are you really sure that being able to amass state table and PCA statistics is enough to definitively prove that Voynichese is meaningless as opposed to , say, shorthand and/or enciphered and/or visually confounded in some way?

I'd agree that what you've done would be a good support for a proof that Voynichese isn't trivially a straightforward language: but you're knocking at an open door there for me.

I suppose what's missing to my eyes is the structure of a workable proof that what we're looking at isn't just confounded in some cunning (but perhaps not actually very complex) way.

There's a difference between the material to form a proof from and an actual proof, and I don't yet see how you have made the transition from the former to the latter.